Pentium Flaw The Pentium Flaw, also known as the Pentium FDIV bug, was a bug located in the FPU, and certain floating point division operations performed would produce incorrect results, which includes decimals, addition and subtraction. These are mostly used in math and some science work. Intel was heavily criticized for the flaw, and the handling of this flaw, which caused them to recall every one of the processors. Dr. Thomas Nicely discovered the bug in 1994. After emailing Intel and receiving
Words: 266 - Pages: 2
The Pentium flaw was that the math coprocessor would have errors when dividing certain floating numbers. “The most famous example and the worst well-known case is 4195835/3145727, discovered by Tim Coe of Vitesse Semiconductors.” (Mark Janeba 1995). This error was originally found by Intel designer shortly after the release of the processor, but it was thought to be such a minor error that there was no need to worry about it. Later the problem was found by a college math professor, named Thomas
Words: 601 - Pages: 3
Pentium Flaw Intel’s famed technical prowess was not without mishaps. Its greatest mistake was the so-called “Pentium flaw,” in which an obscure segment among the Pentium CPU’s 3.1 million transistors performed division incorrectly. Company engineers discovered the problem after the product’s release in 1993 but decided to keep quiet and fix the problem in updates to the chip. However, mathematician Thomas Nicely of Lynchburg College in West Virginia also discovered the flaw. Professor Thomas
Words: 454 - Pages: 2
Pentium Flaw The Intel Pentium FDIV Bug was huge news in 1994. It was a circuit-design manufacturing error that was corrected in the next production of the chip, but the media coverage created a lot of heartache for Intel. Discovery of the bug is credited to a mathematics professor named Thomas Nicely at Lynchburg College in Virginia, who wrote an e-mail to friends and colleagues about his discovery. Before the 1991 introduction of the consumer-centric “Intel Inside” marketing strategy to
Words: 716 - Pages: 3
Pentium Flaw There once was a microprocessor built by Intel that had certain issues. It became infamously known as the “Bug” in the Intel Pentium floating point unit also called Pentium FDIV bug or more commonly known as The Pentium Flaw. The error was very rarely seen by consumers, (1 in 9 billion floating point divide with random parameters would produce inaccurate results) Ref. Wikipedia.org according to bytes magazine. Intel was badly criticized for its initial response and inevitably recalled
Words: 351 - Pages: 2
Pentium Microprocessor Flaw NT1110 19 October, 2013 Pentium Microprocessor Flaw Pentium microprocessor flaw was in the floating-point math subsection. The flaw was found where the division result returned by the Pentium microprocessor was off by approximately sixty-one parts per million. Once Intel pinpointed the flaw, their solution was to keep the information within the company and not disclose the information to the public. Regardless of the fact that the flaw did not affect all microprocessors
Words: 275 - Pages: 2
The Pentium FDIV Bug La Keith Lee EN1320 COMP 1 The Pentium FDIV Bug * On certain input data, the FPDIC (Floating Point Divide Instructions) on the Pentium processor produce inaccurate results. * The error can occur in any of the three operating precisions, namely single, double, or extended, for the divide instruction. However it has been noted that far fewer failures are found in a single precision than double or extended precisions. * The incidence of the problem is independent
Words: 518 - Pages: 3
every company is always trying to one up the other to have the newest and fastest. So when a company has a microprocessor with a flaw it turns into a problem in a hurry. Such was the case with INTEL in 1994. Dr. Thomas R. Nicely, a professor of mathematics at Lynchburg collage in Lynchburg VA was the first person to find the flaw outside of INTEL. Dr. Nicely found this flaw in the floating point unit (numeric co-processor). While performing complicate math equations he found that after the eight
Words: 446 - Pages: 2
Unit 5 Analysis 1: Pentium Flaw The Intel Pentium microprocessor was introduced on March, 1993 that was hugely popular among consumers because of its cheap price and decent performance. Unfortunately, the early versions of these microprocessors had a flow within the floating point unit (also called a math coprocessor). This caused the Pentium's FPU to incorrectly divide certain floating-point numbers. Because only certain numbers divide incorrectly and Intel assumed that many users would never encounter
Words: 252 - Pages: 2
The Pentium floating-point unit flaw only occurred on some models of the original Pentium microprocessor chip. Professor Nicely, a professor of mathematics at Lynchburg College, had written code to enumerate primes, twin primes, prime triplets, and prime quadruplets. Prof. Nicely noticed some inconsistencies in the calculations in June, 1994, shortly after adding a Pentium system to his group of computers, but was unable to eliminate other possible factors until October, 1994. On October 24th, 1994
Words: 431 - Pages: 2
